Friedrich Schlegel's Romanticization of Music

This articles explores Friedrich Schlegel's call for the "romanticization" of music in his early philosophical writings. This romanticization creates an infinitely perfectible musical work of dissonant sounds by actualizing the hermeneutic indeterminacy and anti-systematic tendencies of sonoric signifiers. These conditions initiate a crucial synchronic dialogue between the musical work and its listeners: as listeners actualize the work's dialectical contradictions into non-exhaustive semantic configurations, the work's formal properties shape listeners' thought-processes aesthetically.